GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Running a Garage Door Business

Splitting the Vans: Repairs on One, Installs and Tune-Ups on the Other

Once a garage door company has two vans, it has to decide how to use them. The obvious answer is to split by area, east side and west side. Plenty of companies find a different split works better: one van on repairs and emergency spring calls, the other on installs and tune-ups. Each van gets a kind of day it can actually plan for.

Why Split by Kind of Work

Getting paid on the day, covered in Getting Paid the Same Day: Card on File and Past-Due Follow-Up for Garage Door Companies, is easier when jobs finish on time. Mixing urgent and planned work on the same van is one of the main reasons they do not.

Repairs are unpredictable. A spring call at 9am might be a quick job or turn into cables, rollers and an off-track door. Emergency calls arrive any time. Installs and tune-ups are the opposite: booked ahead, with a known amount of time, at a promised window. Putting both on one van means every surprise repair pushes back a promised install. Splitting them protects the promises.

The Repair Van

The repair van carries the parts for common repairs and takes the calls that come in during the day. Its schedule should be loose on purpose. Book a few repair calls in the morning and leave room for the ones that will come in by phone, text and website request.

The office slots new calls in as they arrive, using the dispatch board filtered to the repair van and crew GPS on the office map to see where it is. Auto-routing from the shop puts the morning calls in a sensible order, and the office can drag the order when an emergency needs to go first.

The Install and Tune-Up Van

The install van runs a planned day. New doors and opener installs take longer and need the right parts loaded the night before. Tune-ups fill the gaps. The Waiting List map shows every tune-up and commercial maintenance visit that has come due, so the office can group them by area around the day's installs.

Customers on this van get a promised window, and the night-before, on-the-way and arrived texts tell them exactly when the tech is coming. Builder installs and property manager maintenance often go here too.

Setting It Up

In GarageDoorBossPro each employee has a personal PIN and a van assignment. Assign your repair tech to Van 1 and your install tech to Van 2. The dispatch board shows jobs by day and filters by van, and saved views let the office flip between “Repairs today” and “Installs this week” in one click. Each tech's phone shows their own calls in the order set on the board.

Route sheets can be printed for each van if a tech likes paper as a backup.

When to Break the Rule

The split is a default, not a law. Break it when it makes sense:

• A slow repair day. If the repair van is light, give it a few tune-ups that are due nearby.
• A big emergency day. If calls are stacking up, the install van can take a repair between installs, as long as the install customer is not left waiting.
• One tech is out. The remaining van handles both, and the office moves non-urgent tune-ups to another day.

Because the door history, access notes and past notes show on every job card, any tech can take any job. The split is about planning, not about who is allowed to do what.

Adding a Third Van

When a third van joins, owners often add a second repair van, or a van dedicated to commercial accounts and property managers with scheduled maintenance and monthly statements. The same principle holds: give each van a kind of day it can plan around. Growth from one van to a few is covered in From One Van to a Few: Growing a Garage Door Business Without Losing Track of the Work.

Tell Customers What to Expect

The split also makes it easier to set expectations on the phone. Install and tune-up customers get a promised window. Repair customers get an honest estimate of when the repair van can reach them, and the live map in the customer app shows them where they are in the day. When the office can say exactly which van is coming and roughly when, customers wait more patiently.

Check It Every Few Weeks

Look at completed jobs by van. Is the repair van always overloaded while the install van runs light? Are installs finishing on time? Adjust which work goes where. Moving off paper, so the board, the techs and the office all see the same thing, is the next guide. For an overview of dispatch and the rest of the tools, see the GarageDoorBossPro garage door business software page.